Real, imaginary, or fictive?

Abstract

This chapter explores a critical yet still unanswered question in fictive interaction research, namely, the relationship between reality, fiction, and fictivity, through examining conversational imagery in a foundational Daoist text, Zhuangzi, and its comic book rendition. This text is the earliest surviving Chinese text to use abundant imagined dialogues between realistic and fantastic characters to present the philosopher’s views. The philosopher thereby fictively talks to himself through these characters in a kind of ventriloquism (Cooren 2010, 2012), the reader becoming a bystander of this fictive conversation. Hence, readers understand the moral of the narrative through reality, fiction, and fictivity. I argue that these ontological categories constitute a continuum and may appear embedded into one another in a conceptual blending net-work.